Cyde, would you mind very much taking your interesting comments to the new talk page. Thank you. |
Stephen Bain (talk | contribs) subst:Request accepted |
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::'''I know that a large group of Admins are planning a concerted unblock. I appreciate the sentiment, but ask that they do not. The Arbcom created this mess - they can sort it. I made 3 edits because I thought I was unblocked - and that the auto-thing was on the account still (like it almost always is after a block runs out). If people think I am so stupid as to sign my name on a block evasion, then that is more insulting than all the other insults concerning me scattered all over the place. [[User:Giano II|Giano]] ([[User talk:Giano II#top|talk]]) 07:51, 17 December 2008 (UTC)''' |
::'''I know that a large group of Admins are planning a concerted unblock. I appreciate the sentiment, but ask that they do not. The Arbcom created this mess - they can sort it. I made 3 edits because I thought I was unblocked - and that the auto-thing was on the account still (like it almost always is after a block runs out). If people think I am so stupid as to sign my name on a block evasion, then that is more insulting than all the other insults concerning me scattered all over the place. [[User:Giano II|Giano]] ([[User talk:Giano II#top|talk]]) 07:51, 17 December 2008 (UTC)''' |
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'''Your request to be unblocked''' has been '''granted''' for the following reason(s): |
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<br><br>A majority of the Committee (FloNight, NewYorkBrad, Sam Blacketer, YellowMonkey, Kirill Lokshin, FT2 and myself) agree to reduce the block to 24 hours. |
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''Request handled by:'' [[User:Stephen Bain|bainer]] ([[User_talk:Stephen Bain|talk]]) 16:56, 17 December 2008 (UTC) |
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Revision as of 16:56, 17 December 2008
User:Apoc2400/Giano unblock request
- I know that a large group of Admins are planning a concerted unblock. I appreciate the sentiment, but ask that they do not. The Arbcom created this mess - they can sort it. I made 3 edits because I thought I was unblocked - and that the auto-thing was on the account still (like it almost always is after a block runs out). If people think I am so stupid as to sign my name on a block evasion, then that is more insulting than all the other insults concerning me scattered all over the place. Giano (talk) 07:51, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, is the grandest and most familiar survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting house, and the only remaining component of the Palace of Whitehall. The building is important in the history of English architecture, as the first classical building to be completed in a style which was to transform English architecture. [1]
Begun in 1619, and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Palladio,[2] it was completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618, just 27 years before King Charles I of England was executed on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649.
The building was controversially re-faced in Portland stone in the 19th century, though the details of the original façade were faithfully preserved.[3] Today, the Banqueting House is a national monument, open to the public and preserved as a Grade I listed building.[4]
History
The Palace of Whitehall was largely the creation of King Henry VIII, expanding an earlier mansion that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, originally known as York Place. The King was determined that his new palace should be the "biggest palace in Christendom," a place befitting his newly created status as the Supreme Head of the Church of England.[5] All evidence of the disgraced Wolsey was eliminated and the building rechristened the Palace of Whitehall.
During Henry's reign, the palace had no designated banqueting house, the King preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens. The first permanent banqueting house at Whitehall had a short life. It was built for James I but was destroyed by fire in January 1619, when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish inside the building.[6]
An immediate replacement was commissioned from the fashionable architect Inigo Jones. Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from the Renaissance and that of Palladio, and returned to England with what at the time were revolutionary ideas: to replace the complicated and confused style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a simpler, classically inspired design. His new banqueting house at Whitehall was to be a prime example of this. Jones made no attempt to harmonise his design with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part.
Architecture
The design of the Banqueting House is classical in concept. It introduced a refined Italianate Renaissance style that was unparalleled in Jacobean England, where Renaissance motives were still filtered through the engravings of Flemish Mannerist designers. The roof is all but flat and the roofline is a balustrade. On the street façade, all the elements of two orders of engaged columns, Corinthian over Ionic, above a high rusticated basement, are locked together in a harmonious whole.
The building is on three floors. The ground floor, a warren of cellars and store rooms, is low; its small windows indicating by their size the lowly status and usage of the floor, above which is the double height banqueting hall, which falsely appears from the outside as a first floor piano nobile with a secondary floor above. The seven bays of windows divided by Ionic pilasters of the "first floor" are surmounted by alternating triangular and segmental pediments, while the windows of the "second floor" are unadorned casements. Immediately beneath the entablature, which projects to emphasize the central three bays, the capitals of the Corinthian pilasters are linked by swags in relief above which the entablature, crowned by a balustrade, is supported by dental corbel table.
Much of the work on the Banqueting House was overseen by Nicholas Stone, a Devonshire mason, who had trained in Holland. It has been said that until this time English sculpture resembled that described by the Duchess of Malfi: "the figure cut in alabaster kneels at my husband's tomb."[7] Like Ingo Jones, Stone was well aware of Florentine art, and introduced to England, a more delicate classical form of sculpture inspired by Michaelangelo's Medici tombs. This is evident in his swags on the street façade of the Banqueting House, similar to that which adorns the plinth of his Francis Holles memorial. All of this was quite new to England.
In 1638, Jones drew the designs for a new and massive palace at Whitehall in which his banqueting house was to be incorporated as one wing enclosing a series of seven courtyards. However, Charles I, who commissioned the plans, never truly had the resources to execute them; his lack of funds and the tensions that eventually led to the Civil War intervened and the plans were permanently shelved.
The plans of the new palace reveal the ideas behind Jones' concept of Palladianism, which is not apparently obvious from viewing the Banqueting House today as one entity. The plans show that it was intended to be one small flanking wing of one bay of a monumental façade.
As it was, architecturally, the Banqueting House was always be to be at odds with its surroundings. In January 1698, the Tudor Palace was razed by fire; fire engines pumping water from the adjacent River Thames were unable to check the flames, which raged for seventeen hours, after which all that remained was the Banqueting House and the Whitehall and Holbein Gates.[8]
Following the fire, Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor were asked to design a new palace but nothing came of the scheme. It has been said that the widowed William III never cared for the area, but that had his wife Mary II been alive, with her appreciation of the historical significance of Whitehall, he would have insisted on the rebuilding.[9]
Interior
The term Banqueting House was something of a misnomer. The hall within the house was in fact used not only for banqueting but royal receptions, ceremonies, and the performance of masques.[10] The entertainments given here would have been among the finest in Europe, for during this period England was considered the leading musical country of Europe. Such masques were augmented with French musicians whom Queen Henrietta Maria brought to the court.[11] The masques began a slow decline, however, after the death in 1625 of Orlando Gibbons, who ironically died on a trip to meet the newly married Henrietta Maria and her musicians.
Inside the building is a single two-storey double-cube room. The double cube room is another Palladianism, where all proportions are mathematically related by ratio. Thus the length of the room is twice its width and half its height. At second floor level the room is surrounded by what is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a minstrels' gallery. While musicians may have played from this vantage point, its true purpose was to admit an audience, for at the time of the Banqueting House's construction Kings still lived in "splendour and state" which equated to publicly. The less exalted and the general public would be permitted to crowd the gallery in order to watch the King dine. The lower status of those in the gallery was emphasised by the lack of an internal staircase, the gallery only being accessible by an external staircase. The building was, however, later extended to accommodate a staircase internally.
James I, for whom the Banqueting House was created, died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, the ill-fated Charles I. The accession of Charles I heralded a new era in the cultural history of England. The new King was a great patron of the arts—he added to the Royal Collection and encouraged the great painters of Europe to come to England. In 1623 he visited Spain where he was impressed by Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez.[12] It became his ambition to find a comparable painter for his own court. Rubens was lured to England with the offer of a knighthood, and it was at this time that the Banqueting House ceiling was painted in 1635. The subject, commissioned by the King, was the glorification of his father, entitled The Apotheosis of James I and was an allegory of his own birth. [13] To the King's chagrin, having finished the ceiling, Rubens took his knighthood and decamped back to Antwerp, leaving Anthony van Dyck, lured not only with a knighthood, but a also pension and a house, to remain in England as the court painter.[14] Inigo Jones was later to design another double cube room, this one at Wilton House, to display Van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family.
Legacy
Unlike the architecture of the more southern European countries, English architecture went through no period of evolution to classicism. Through Jones it arrived, suddenly, and fully formed. Prior to this, English architecture had still been based on the styles of the Middle Ages, albeit for the previous century influenced indirectly by the Italian Renaissance, which had resulted in an English renaissance style during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.[15] However, as can be seen at Hatfield House, one of England's first purpose built "Renaissance" houses, even during this era, English domestic architecture never quite lost its "castle air."
Thus, through Inigo Jones' work at the Queen's House and the Banqueting House, English architecture was transformed. The overthrow of the monarch and establishment of the puritanical Commonwealth caused the style to be seen as Royalist which delayed its spread, but within a few years of The Restoration almost every English town and village was to have buildings in the classical style. The Banqueting House and its features became much copied. A much favoured motif was the placing of pediments above, not only the focal point of a facade, but also its windows. The use of alternating segmental and triangular pediments was an arrangement that had never been used in England before, but had been employed by Vasari as early as 1550 at the Medici's Palazzo Uffizi in Florence.[16] Provincial architects began to recreate the motifs of the Banqueting House, with varying degrees of competence, throughout England. Examples of the style's popularity can be found throughout England; the then-remote county of Somerset alone contains three 17th-century versions of the Banqueting House: Brympton d'Evercy, Hinton House, and Ashton Court.[17] Followng the fall of the monarchy, Jones' career was effectively ended, his style seen as royalist. He died in 1652, never having seen the popularity of the architectural concepts he introduced.
Charles II was the last monarch to live at Whitehall; William III and Mary II preferred to live elsewhere and eventually reconstructed Hampton Court Palace. Following the fire which destroyed Whitehall Palace the Banqueting Hall became redundant for the purpose for which it was designed, and it was converted to a chapel to replace the Chapel Royal of Whitehall, which had been destroyed in the fire. It remained a chapel for the following two hundred years.
See also
Notes
- ^ While the Queen's House at Greenwich is often referred to as as England's first consciously classical building, its delayed completion was not until 1635, some thirteen years after the completion of the Banqueting House. Halliday, p149.
- ^ Coppelstone, p. 835.
- ^ William, p. 47
- ^ Images of England: Banqueting House, English Heritage, retrieved 2008-02-29
- ^ Williams, p.45
- ^ Williams, p.45.
- ^ Halliday, p.154
- ^ Williams, p.50.
- ^ Williams, p.50.
- ^ Great Buildings
- ^ Halliday, p156.
- ^ Halliday
- ^ Halliday, p152.
- ^ Halliday, p152.
- ^ Halliday, p148
- ^ Coppelstone, p.249.
- ^ Dunning, p21
References
- Robert Dunning, Somerset Country Houses. 1991. The Dovecote Press Ltd. Wimborne, Dorset.
- The Department for the Environment (1983). The Banqueting House Whitehall. Her Majesty's Stationery Office. ISBN 0-86056-106-2.
- Halliday, E. E. (1967). Cultural History of England. London: Thames & Hudson.
- Williams, Neville (1971). Royal Homes. Lutterworth Press. ISBN 0-7188-0803-7
51°30′16″N 0°07′32″W / 51.5044°N 0.1256°W
[Category:Royal buildings in London]] [Category:Buildings and structures in Westminster]] [Category:Grade I listed palaces]] [Category:Grade I listed buildings in London]] [Category:1622 architecture]]
bg:Банкетна къща
ca:Casa del Banquet
de:Banqueting House
es:Banqueting House
fr:Maison des banquets
he:בית הסעודות
ka:საბანკეტო სახლი
ja:バンケティング・ハウス
no:Banqueting House
sv:Banqueting House
Facts from the old WP page that I may use if a ref can be found and they seem needed
The Undercroft was originally designed as a drinking den for James I and a place where he could escape the rigours of public life. The King would come here to savour a glass of wine from his extensive cellars, or simply enjoy some private time with his favourite courtiers.
- Historic Royal Palaces -- Banqueting House
- The Banqueting House at the Survey of London
- Great Buildings website
- View of Whitehall in 1669, showing the Banqueting House and Holbein Gateway
No, don't worry dean I asked him to - it's OK. Thanks Jack. When is this silly situation die to expire - anyone know? Giano (talk) 14:57, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
May I recommend...
K-Meleon? It's relatively similar to IE (assuming that's what you use), more lightweight than FireBloat, and I've never had it had it lose the contents of a text box on me. --NE2 16:10, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- I donn't know, but whenever I have a conflict or anything like that it always says your text is here or there, yet it never is - never ever ever. Plus the fact i always have wikipedia open twice and it's always the oneI have fiddled with ongest that gets lost - perhaps I am just an exxentric editor! My mind does not seem to work like other peoples. :-( Giano (talk) 16:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Your block
- Block discussion and followup moved to: User:Giano/talk, at user's request. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Copyediting
Would one of you mind copyediting the above, you keep conflicting me. I can never see my own spellings and grammars. I am very keen to get finished, it just needs a little more expansion to the conclusion and wraping up which I can do when it's copedited. perhaps you would all like to take your discussions to the desinated place, while the copyediting is done. Thank you. Giano (talk) 18:23, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
G, do you want to mention the single cube room at the Queen's house or are you sticking to double cubes? --Joopercoopers (talk) 19:53, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Any info on the 19th century re-facing? --Joopercoopers (talk) 20:11, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Yes and No, I have a feeling Soane was involved, which should thrill the man that keeps pesterimg me to write about Soane, but i can't find a ref, buyt I'm sure in my subconscious I have read it somewhere. Giano (talk) 22:26, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Seems he won a medal for drawing it as a young man. [1] This is rather interesting reading for the post-1698 history. [2] --Joopercoopers (talk) 23:26, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Yes and No, I have a feeling Soane was involved, which should thrill the man that keeps pesterimg me to write about Soane, but i can't find a ref, buyt I'm sure in my subconscious I have read it somewhere. Giano (talk) 22:26, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Coo, that's ineresting, it's coming back to me, i think he was the one who allowed the refacing in his position as Clerk of Works - I have looked through all the books I have here and cannot find where I read it. Giano (talk) 23:29, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- "The architect James Wyatt was directed to provide additional seating for more than 2,000 soldiers, necessitating the building of a second gallery (later removed). At the same time, Wyatt rebuilt the northern annexe, which contained the main entrance staircase. The Times of March 1815, recorded that the 'new alterations and the new organ by Elliot attracted a crowded chapel'." Strangely, our article on him doesn't mention it. Here's a nice historical overview from the same site. [3] My books draw a blank on the banqueting house, but my book on Greenwich makes it clear Jones was at court both because of his study of palladianism in Italy, but more importantly, because of his collaboration in the masques with Johnson.--Joopercoopers (talk) 23:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Hang on I remember writing some red links for Bishonen years ago about Carolean drama, I think Jones may have designed fantastical stes with moving scenery, or was that someone else - Bishonen will rmemeber. Giano (talk) 23:52, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- I'm sure that's on the money. He got the Queen's house commission on the back of it. --Joopercoopers (talk) 23:56, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Hang on I remember writing some red links for Bishonen years ago about Carolean drama, I think Jones may have designed fantastical stes with moving scenery, or was that someone else - Bishonen will rmemeber. Giano (talk) 23:52, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- "The architect James Wyatt was directed to provide additional seating for more than 2,000 soldiers, necessitating the building of a second gallery (later removed). At the same time, Wyatt rebuilt the northern annexe, which contained the main entrance staircase. The Times of March 1815, recorded that the 'new alterations and the new organ by Elliot attracted a crowded chapel'." Strangely, our article on him doesn't mention it. Here's a nice historical overview from the same site. [3] My books draw a blank on the banqueting house, but my book on Greenwich makes it clear Jones was at court both because of his study of palladianism in Italy, but more importantly, because of his collaboration in the masques with Johnson.--Joopercoopers (talk) 23:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Can you ask Bishonen, she seems to have email switched off, no one is going to notice here. Giano (talk) 00:00, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
- I've finished a light copyedit; more by others probably wouldn't hurt.Bishonen | talk 21:08, 16 December 2008 (UTC).
Barnstar
The Resilient Barnstar | ||
Which editor would still write quality articles for Wikipedia even while he is currently blocked? Mailer Diablo 19:38, 16 December 2008 (UTC) |
- God knows how many purple hearts do the rank-and-file owe you already! - Mailer Diablo 19:38, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Paste fast
Can someone paste this over, unfinished as it is - I don't want it deleted or oversighted or anything. Thanks. Giano (talk) 23:40, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Done. It turned out User:The wub had done some editing, so I tried to merge, and am updating this page too. Also, sorry you have to work in this mess. --Apoc2400 (talk) 02:15, 17 December 2008 (UTC)